Wellington’s boots

It should have been a five-minute research job, a bit of fun before I settled down to write about Roman Britain.

After a muddy walk in the woods with our two dogs, I gratefully pulled off my wellingtons and thought, “I wonder what the original Duke of Wellington’s boots looked like? He designed them and made them fashionable; I’ll find a painting or a statue of him on the Internet. It won’t take long at all.”

Ah well…

The trouble is I love research, and when my five minutes were up, I didn’t stop.

There’s plenty of general info out there about how Wellington designed the boots, based on a German style of boot called the Hessian. They were knee-high, low-heeled, and perfect for riders because the slightly pointed toes fitted a stirrup. They were of soft leather, waxed to make them more flexible still and keep the water out.  They sound high maintenance, with much cleaning and polishing, and to start with they were fashionable among the richer folk, who had people to do that sort of thing for them. Then in the 1850s, when Charles Goodyear had invented vulcanisation, some enterprising Americans hit on the brainwave of making rubber wellies. The really watertight, easy-clean boot was born and became the universal wet-weather hit we all know today.

Fine. But I still wanted to see an image of the old Duke showing his footwear off, spurred on (whoops, sorry,) by the fact that it wasn’t easy to find one. There are plenty of portraits and statues of him, as you’d expect of such a famous soldier and statesman; after winning at Waterloo he went on to be Prime Minister. But mostly they show him just head-and-shoulders, or if he’s full length he’s wearing shoes. This honourable exception stands in Glasgow, and next time I’m there I’ll make a pilgrimage to it.

Maybe artists at the time didn’t realise that the welly-boot would prove to be at least as important and useful as his other achievements? Maybe they were just being conventional? Maybe Wellington himself preferred shoes? I wonder now whether anybody knows…

No you don’t, you lazy, easily-distracted mystery writer. Get back to Roman Britain, where they’d have given their eye teeth for really waterproof footwear. If you absolutely must wonder about something, consider how awful it must have been for a Roman soldier, or a native British farmer, to endure our wet weather for days on end with only leather protecting their cold feet. They had reasonable boots with closed-in uppers, not just the overgrown sandals that would have been suitable in more southerly provinces; and of course there were some good roads between towns, and towns themselves would have had some paved streets. But the fact remains that most people, most of the autumn and winter, would have been slogging through mud, longing for a hard frost to make the going easier.

So I’ll think about that, and then maybe I can kid myself that galloping all over the Information Super-Highway in search of the Iron Duke was useful research, not just fun. Maybe…

Who wants dislikeable sleuths?

Today I finished a really good book: HARD FROST, by R. D. Wingfield. Truth to tell I finished it at 2.30 a.m. this morning. I was reading it in bed, and the final climax was too gripping to allow me to sleep till I’d reached the resolution.

I always enjoy Wingfield’s books about Detective-Inspector Jack Frost. The tv programmes too, but time prevents their including all the subtle, twisty complexities of the novels…so I’m focusing on the books for now.

They have so many ingredients that a good mystery needs. The picture they give of life in a 1980s provincial British town’s police station rings true: the constant pressure of too may crimes to solve and too much bureaucracy, the relationships between Frost and his police colleagues…all this goes to make up fast-paced, interesting mysteries, with satisfying resolutions.

And above all, Frost is a likeable character. I need to like a sleuth, as well as respecting him or her. They don’t have to be saints, indeed I shy away from too-good-to-be-true creations, but they need a little humanity…like the austere Sherlock Holmes, who can be so cold and clinical, (and so horrible to poor Watson,) yet displays kindness and compassion sometimes, and on occasions prefers his own real justice to the arbitrary dictates of the law.

As for Jack Frost, on first meeting, you wonder if you’re ever going to like him. But he grows on you. You soon find you’re wishing him well, you want him to succeed.

Consider his most outrageous qualities. He’s rebellious and often grumpy, and he’s gratuitously rude, not just to the self-seeking Superintendent Mullett who deserves it, but to members of the public he doesn’t take to. He frequently makes mistakes when following a line of investigation. He cuts corners, sometimes not averse to a bit of breaking-and-entering if he is convinced someone’s life is at risk, which it often isn’t. He smokes and drinks too much, he’s always scruffy and unkempt, he’s too fond of tasteless dirty jokes. I don’t think I’d invite him to an even half-civilised dinner party. (He probably wouldn’t come anyway.)

But if I needed a crime solved, I’d want him then all right. And that’s what makes him likeable, why his good points outweigh his bad ones.  He’s an honest, persistent detective, and he has compassion; he understands that sometimes people are driven into crime by circumstances they can’t control. He’s gentle with people he considers vulnerable, even if they don’t repay him with kindness. He’s got a sense of humour and of irony. He needs both.

And he has an unerring instinct for what’s right and just, and goes all out to achieve it. He knows this isn’t always the same as what’s legal; and here too he bends the rules… and you can’t help but approve. He’s completely uninterested in any personal credit, so his more unscrupulous colleagues get the kudos for work he’s done. He won’t respect authority just because someone else tells him to. People have to earn his respect. That’s why he earns mine.

As well as liking Jack Frost the detective, I admire R. D. Wingfield for creating such a wonderful mixture of a man, a believable human being who has good and bad qualities in about equal measure. It’s Frost’s character more than any other single element that makes his adventures unputdownable for me…even till long past my bedtime.

The Pericles Commission

A warm welcome to Gary Corby, and to his new mystery, THE PERICLES COMMISSION. It’s published by St. Martin’s Minotaur, and is out this month in the USA, next month here in the UK, and in January 2011 in Gary’s home country, Australia. It’s the first in a series set in fifth-century BC Greece, and  I must confess that’s not an era that’s very familiar to me. So I asked Gary what had made him choose it for his setting?

Back in 461 BC, in a city called Athens, the people decided that they could do a better job of running things than any group of privileged wealthy.  So they started a system where everyone got a vote.  It was the world’s first democracy, and at that moment, western civilization began.

There are other dates you could argue for, but it’s hard to go past this one: a sovereign state with one man one vote, free speech for every citizen, written laws and equality before the law, with open courts and trial by jury.

It all sounds terribly modern, doesn’t it?  That’s because our civilization is based on this one crucial moment.  This is the period we know today as the Golden Age of Athens,  fifty years of astounding invention.

At that moment in 461 BC, Aeschylus was inventing drama; two young men called Sophocles and Euripides followed him with their own plays.  A philosopher called Anaxagoras developed a theory of matter in which everything was made of infinitesimal particles.  That was the birth of atomic theory.  Herodotus was traveling the world, writing his book and in the process founding both history and anthropology.  A young kid called Socrates was outside somewhere, playing in the street, and on the island of Kos, a baby called Hippocrates was born to a doctor and his wife.

There’s a good reason to begin a murder mystery series at this auspicious date: The Pericles Commission is based on the real,  historical murder of a statesman called Ephialtes.  He’s largely forgotten today, but this man created democracy, and mere days later was assassinated for his trouble.  The men behind the historical killing were never found.

If Ephialtes was killed to stifle the new system, then the plot failed, because when they murdered Ephialtes they replaced a great statesman with a political genius.  Ephialtes had a lieutenant, a rising young politician by the name of Pericles. Pericles held it together.  Somehow.  It must have been a challenge even for him, but Athens kept its shiny new democracy.  One of the things Pericles did to save Athens in its moment of crisis was to commission a young man named Nicolaos, the ambitious son of a minor sculptor, to uncover the killers, and that’s the point where my fiction emerges from reality.

I had enormous fun weaving fiction into the fabric of truth.  I wrote The Pericles Commission in first person from the viewpoint of Nicolaos.  Nicolaos didn’t exist, but his irritating younger brother did: a chap by the name of Socrates.  Socrates had no known full siblings, and yet, Nicolaos would not be impossible.  The fact that Nicolaos doesn’t show up in the historical record is no objection.  The period is poorly documented and even some quite prominent men have only a few lines in the histories. When you throw in the fact that Nicolaos is doing discreet investigation…of course no one has heard of him until now.

You can keep up with Gary on Twitter (some of his tweets make me laugh out loud, which isn’t bad going in the standard 140-character length!)  and on his blog, http://www.garycorby.com

Meet Gary Corby here tomorrow

I’m delighted to announce that Australian writer Gary Corby will be my guest here tomorrow, to tell us about his debut mystery, THE PERICLES COMMISSION. It’s set in ancient Athens, and  it’s so new I haven’t read it yet.  I’m always specially pleased when I find another ancient hist-myst nut – that’s to say, another mystery author who’s hooked on the classical world; and Gary’s book is set in the fifth century BC, which makes my first-century AD Roman series seem quite modern by comparison. The Romans owed a lot to the Greeks – and we owe a lot to both. So I’m going to find this book fascinating.

Though I haven’t met Gary personally (yet,) I feel I know him a bit, having encountered him in cyberspace…first on Twitter and then through his blog at http://blog.garycorby.com/ which has the wonderful title “A dead man fell from the sky”, the first line of his novel.  His tweets and his blog posts range from Greek history to sheer fun, and often both at once.

Apart from our love of history and mysteries, Gary and I have at least one more thing in common: we’ve both worked in computers. He used to work for Microsoft; he’s even met Bill Gates. I was a programmer for a subsidiary of ICL, and never met my own ultimate boss, let alone  anyone as stellar as W. Gates. Is there some sort of weird connection between computers and the ancient past?  I can’t think of one. I know the Romans would have loved them, and if they’d invented them, we’d probably all be talking Latin to this day.

Tomorrow, thanks to computers, we’ll bridge the miles between me in England, Gary in Sydney, and all you lovely mystery readers, wherever you are. Come and join us.

Why leaarn Latin?

People ask me, when they discover I write about Roman Britain, whether I know Latin. Yes, I understand it more or less, having learned it at school and had to study it at University too, as part of my mediaeval history course. Mediaeval Latin is a lot easier than the classical Roman kind, because it was written down by monks and clerks and other people who didn’t speak it as their first language but used it as a lingua franca (if you’ll pardon the expression!) They lived in England or France or other non-Italian places, and  had a good working knowledge of Latin, but their thought-processes were in their mother tongue, which makes their prose a lot simpler to follow.

Many schools taught Latin in the 1950s. Nowadays it’s regarded as unusual, but I just accepted it. I liked languages, (I still do,) and I enjoyed it, especially once I’d got interested in Roman history as a teenager. Probably the bits of Roman history I picked up in Latin lessons helped me to get hooked.

I recall one of the main reasons trotted out by schools like ours for including it in the curriculum.  “Its logical structure will help you to think logically.” This struck me as questionable even at the time, and it still does.

Latin has a complicated and detailed grammar, with its own in-built logic I suppose, and you have to understand its rules. There are the various different declensions of nouns, and half-a-dozen cases…don’t panic, I’m not going to slide into linguist-type jargon. Let’s just say, for example, that the word for “road” is spelled slightly differently when you’re saying “The road is long” as distinct from  “I see the road” or “I see the potholes in the road.” (No doubt the Romans had those too.) It’s the same for every noun.

Is this logic in any real sense? I don’t think so. A road is a road is a road in my book. Besides which, Latin like any language was spoken by and  to and for not-very-logical humans, so every grammar rule has its exceptions, and you have to learn those as well. I accept it’s probably a good idea to get across to children that nothing human is 100% logical – but I don’t think that’s what the old-time enthusiasts for Latin had in mind.

There are several other excellent  reasons for learning it though. It helps towards understanding other European languages, like Italian and Spanish and French. It helps in English vocabulary too, since so many of our words are rooted in Latin. And in the sciences it’s invaluable – plant names and so on.

Garden enthusiasts know that, going round a garden centre or browsing a seed catalogue, you’re wise to go by the Latin name of a plant, which should be standard for that plant, whereas its common country name can vary a lot. And you can often learn something handy about it if you can recognise Latin descriptive words like “golden” or “purple” when they crop up (sorry!) as part of its name.

Well, you’re saying, Jane writes about the Romans, so she would find Latin interesting and worthwhile, wouldn’t she? True. But, you continue,  it’s a dead language. Is it really worth children learning it nowadays?

I answer a resounding YES. Not for the dubious attributes of its logic, but because although it’s a dead language, it’s also dead useful.